Refugee crisis will stand out also in 2016

A responsible migration, asylum, and integration policy should be one of the priorities of the next government, but the programmes of parties leave little room for optimism, according to NGOs.

Human rights advocates expect the mass arrival of refugees to Europe to dominate the human rights agenda in 2016. The Human Rights League has been pointing to Slovakia’s lack of an asylum process. Zuzana Števulová from the Human Rights League says that the immigration and asylum-granting process in Slovakia suffers from absence of experts on the part of the government, and lack of vision. “It has been a topic that nobody wanted to touch,” Števulová says.

Šarlota Pufflerová, the executive director of the Citizen, Democracy, Responsibility (ODZ) non-governmental organisation maintains that there is a problem among people to understand the refugee crisis also because the authorities have been failing in preparing the citizens for the related challenges. The discourse the political parties lead about refugees betrays their lack of basic human-rights principles, Pufflerová noted.

“Tolerance is too little in the 21st century,” Pufflerová said. Only those who know their own rights can picture the situation of a person who is deprived of his or her rights, and those who know Slovakia’s commitments in the human rights area, knows very well what the government should be doing, she said.